A reflection on returning

Driving east over the Cascades at Snoqualmie Pass for the first time since moving to Seattle a year ago, I flicked on an audio file of “K. Ross Toole’s Montana,” a 10-hour public television recording of his final Montana history lectures at UM in 1981. If you’ve listened to our first episode, you’ve heard some clips.

As I hope many other listeners of that episode felt, Toole’s words seemed somehow divinely inspired, prophetic in his view that Montana’s next great commodity wouldn’t be mined or slaughtered or dammed, it would be filled: “Beautiful space, clean space, quiet space, space rich in the qualities which Americans, having increasingly lost it elsewhere, are now seeking as they have never sought it before.” This was 1981. 

However, Toole would likely be the first to note that his words were far from prophetic, but rather an obvious next step in Montana’s cycle of boom and bust, commodification and exploitation by the monied outsiders — a cycle which Toole felt should and could be broken, an idea he held as his raison d’etre throughout his life as a historian, public commentator, and political watchdog. 

But this lecture was Toole’s last stand, and he knew it well. 

I was aware that he died of cancer at the young age of 61 (exactly 40 years ago today as I write this), not long after his lecture series was recorded. But it wasn’t until I heard him tell this final class — a lecture hall filled with 1,700 students seeking the wisdom of a dying man — that the gravity of his words caught up to me. 

“Indeed, the task is difficult, it will continue to be difficult. But it’s up to you people now, not to me anymore…” As Toole speaks these words, knowing he will soon die, his voice trails off and wavers, gripped by his own mortality. But it quickly returns with vigor as he delivers his prescription for how Montanans can indeed take on the task at hand without him.

Hearing these words as I descended the east side of the Cascades, as the thick smoke of the arid, burning West replaced the clear humid skies of the coast, I couldn’t help but get choked up, and I’d be dishonest if I hid that a few tears fell in my lap. Not for the dead man, not because the mission he tasked us all with felt impossible, but because I felt I had personally failed Toole’s big ask. 

I’ve said before that Montana in many ways is still the frontier to me. You show up, they don’t ask for a resumé, they just ask “Can you do it?” and you say yes. And then both of you find out if that’s true, if you can or if you can’t. I was proud to find out I could a few times over the years. Montana gave me everything I had, and while not much at any point, it was always enough. From my first job dishwashing at the Outback Steakhouse in Missoula, through multiple kitchen jobs, various side gigs too numerous to list here, a college degree, and becoming a full-time journalist at my adopted hometown’s newspaper, it felt like Montana was there for me, its people actively helping me grow along the way. And then I gave up on it.

I believe if Toole hadn’t become an academic historian, he would have been a hell of a reporter. He was never afraid to cross into muckraking, to be prescriptive where other historians academically dither. Whether it was corrupt Montana politicians or greedy corporate interests sucking Montana dry, he wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power and say loudly how he thought things ought to be. This too is what I once felt called to do.

In May 2020, I decided I was done with journalism. The pay was so low, each month I went further and further into debt just to stay alive. What once felt like a noble calling - to be broke, but be a fighter for the little guy; to live the cliché of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable — was running up against my ability to stay afloat. It was hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and increasingly as the pandemic took hold, isolation turned into resentment and I split. I quit my job, and I quit Montana. And now, hearing Toole’s words, I couldn’t help but feel I’d sold out the state that took me in.

But there, driving through the plains of eastern Washington, with Toole’s lecture a steady, haunting soundtrack reminding me that “Montanans, and Montanans alone” can protect and preserve the place that we love, I was left to wonder: Have I ever been, and if so, am I still, Montanan enough to join in that fight? Not for now, not until it gets hard, but for the long and unending battle the people of Montana have always needed to fight to remain the Last Best Place?

I guess time will tell. But I’ll be damned if I don’t give it at least one more shot, and I know John will be there with me and more. 

So stay tuned for what we’ve got cooking, and remember this is an independent production, humbly sustained by donations from people like you.

For Montana,

Matt Neuman

The Last of the Last Best Place

“Having lost so much, how can we keep the little that is left? This is the unspoken fear behind public policy debate in Montana, from concerns about protecting the wilderness, the water, and the air to promoting free enterprise, economic development, trade, and growth.” 

-Mary Clearman Blew

Frontier Dreams

Howdy there, weary internet traveler. If you’re here reading this, I’m assuming it’s because you’ve seen or listened to some of the content we’ve been putting out in our big Land Grab release. Throughout the run of production and release of the show I’m going to run a little blog over here to give a little more insight into the ideas behind the show and explain a few things we might not have time or space to fit into episodes. In this first post, I want to talk a little bit more about the first episode we’ve just released, the project ahead of us, and our reasons for making the show. 

As far as the specific entity of Land Grab goes, this is something I’ve been working on in earnest for months, starting back in February and roping my friend and colleague Matt Neuman in with me. But the big questions and ideas that drive the heart of the show are things I’ve been working on and thinking about for years. I know for certain the first time they really crystallized in my brain was on the night of the 2018 elections, when I was more than a few beers into the night, watching results coming in at the Union Club in Missoula and thinking that a red wave of carpetbaggers was sweeping in to kill any last shred of hope that Montana was special. I summarized how I thought and felt at the time in this piece up on the Montana Kaimin, which I called, aptly, The Myth of the Last Best Place.  

Looking back on that now, it kind of fills me with cringe. Not just because it’s a hagiography for Exxon’s main man in congress, but because of how much of a blind, uncritical feeling of entitlement to an idea of Montana exceptionalism is in there; the idea that this place is special and those of us “from here” are special because we recognize its true value. 

 But if I am of a mind to cut my younger self some slack, I can look at The Myth of the Last Best Place now and understand it as simply the beginning of an interrogation. In the most personal sense, the first probing questions and thoughts on the query of I’m trying to figure out why I’ve been lied to. Why I have felt this soul-deep exasperation that for my whole life Montana had promised to be one thing -independent, conservationist, different-  while always being the opposite when it really mattered. Of how and why Montana could build up this mythology and self-identity of lessons learned from the past, of knowing better, while never seeming to take any of those lessons to heart. At its core, those are the questions that drive Land Grab: how we can tell one set of stories about who we are as a place and an idea, while invariably living out another.  I think those questions are as relevant right now as they have been at any point throughout our history, because what is at stake right now is nothing more or less than the last of the Last Best Place. 

One thing that I have to cop to and address is the fact that I’ve been working on this podcast as I have moved away from Montana. Splitting my time and myself between Montana and my new home in Seattle. I am deeply aware of the irony mixed up in that fact and the subject of this project, and there’s little I can say to really emolliate that, but I will endeavor to nonetheless. Because the issues at the heart of things right now are housing and migration; and making the move and splitting time between Seattle and Montana has given me a real perspective on the trajectory of the process, the whole gross paradoxical cycle. I came out to the coast and saw the full endgame of housing inequality realized, understood why all the people out here who have made the place essentially inhospitable for anyone even close to middle class are so desperate to leave and start somewhere new. And then I go back to Montana and see how the same people are moving in and working to make it inhospitable in the same way.  

Montana’s position -as a place and an idea- has always been at the butt end of that cycle. I think Leslie Fielder phrased it best in saying “When the point of irreconcilable conflict between fact and fiction had been reached earlier, the [American] Dream had been projected westward toward a new Frontier- but Montana is a last Frontier; there is no more ultimate West.” And here we are again in that familiar spot, the last repository for hope and a new start when the rest of America has failed to live up to its myth. But as Fielder notes, we’re the last stop of the Dream, and we’ve been the last stop for so long, and there is so little left, that it is extremely unlikely we can go through another one of these cycles without becoming something different entirely- as a place and an idea. 

I hope listening to our introductory episode of Land Grab will help you explore and understand how what is happening right now with the housing crisis, population influx, and development boom is the continuation of a long cyclical process, one that is inextricably tied up in the myths we’ve created about ourselves and our history. I hope you’ll listen to our reporting about a proposed new development in Bozeman that the developers want to call “Buffalo Run”, and think not just about the current economic and political issues encapsulated within, but also about what it means to build a luxury condo development under that name just miles from the Madison Buffalo Jump, where indigenous nations built the economic and spiritual center of their lives for tens of thousands of years, and in the same valley that trains of buffalo hunters would ride through on their genocidal campaign to rid the state of its rightful inhabitants. I hope you’ll think about the history we wear so proudly on our sleeve in Montana and question the mythology we’ve built out of it. 

I’m tremendously excited to release the project and to start putting it out into the world. This is an independent production in the truest sense of the word, and there is so much that is great and liberating in that. It allows us to tell these stories without interference or kowtowing to the interests of a publisher or the constraints of legacy media. But there are also obvious drawbacks to being independent, namely in time and resources. We’re doing this advance rollout of the intro episode and all this content to try and drum up interest and donations to support us as we travel across Montana doing interviews and finishing up our first series of episodes on the Allotment drive and homestead boom. I know that times are extremely tough for a lot of us right now and that donating to a podcast is a rather dubious expense, but truly any contribution of any amount would be extremely helpful and will go directly to helping us carry this thing over the finish line. So if you feel like this is an important project, and that these are stories that should be told, and now is the time to tell them, I hope you’ll consider making a donation. 

The best part of working on this project so far has been the help, support, and togetherness we have felt from the friends, family, and colleagues who have given us tips and feedback and endless conversations that have been crucial to the formulation of the show. The classic Montana small town helpfulness vibes have been impeccable, and we are very thankful to everyone who’s helped us get to this point. I’ll sign off here on a short personal note and just say that, right at its heart, beneath all its layers, this endeavor is an expression of love for Montana- the people, the place, and the idea. I’ve never worked harder or put more of myself into anything that I’ve made, and I hope it will make you all proud. 

With love and solidarity, 

John Hooks